Additional Questions

While the following questions are not applicable to creating your usage
profile, they are important to developing your sizing strategy. How you answer
these questions might require you to consider additional hardware.

How much redundancy do you want in your deployment?

For
example, you might consider high availability. Consider how much down time
is allowed, and if you need clustering technology.

What backup and restore strategy do you have in place (such
as disaster recovery, mailbox restores, and site failover)? What
are the expected times to accomplish recovery tasks?

Do you need a DMZ to separate your internal and external networks?
Are all users using the internal network? Or do some of them connect by using
the Internet?

You might need MMP proxy servers and separate MTA
layers.

What are your response time requirements? What are your throughput
requirements?

What is your specific criteria for resource utilization? Can
your CPUs be 80 percent busy on average? Or only at peak?

Will you have messaging servers at different geographic locations?
Do you expect users’ mail to be located geographically?

Do you have archiving requirements for keeping mail messages
for a certain length of time?

Do you have legal requirements to log all messages? Do you
need to keep a copy of every message sent and received?